In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads—in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. — Jacques Barzun

Wretchard’s Three Conjectures

Wretchard at the Belmont Club argues that U.S. success in the War on Terror is necessary to the survival of Islam. He makes three conjectures:

Terrorism has lowered the nuclear threshold.

Attaining WMDs will destroy Islam.

The War on Terror is the ‘Golden Hour’ — the final chance.

His idea, in essence, is that radical Islamists with WMD capability present a set of scenarios very different from those presented by the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. No one doubted the Soviet’s capacity to attack the U.S.; the issue was willingness. With radical Islamists, it’s just the reverse. No one doubts their willingness; the issue is capability. Once that capability is developed and recognized, he contends, thinking through strategies makes it clear that the only rational response is “total retaliatory extermination”:

The so-called strengths of Islamic terrorism: fanatical intent; lack of a centralized leadership; absence of a final authority and cellular structure guarantee uncontrollable escalation once the nuclear threshold is crossed. Therefore the ‘rational’ American response to the initiation of terrorist WMD attack would be all out retaliation from the outset.

In that light, it’s interesting to hear about five senior military strategists urging NATO to take a nuclear first-strike option seriously.

I’m not convinced by Wretchard’s analysis, however. More likely than WMDs, especially nukes, that terrorist cells can master on their own is the single-source scenario: the possibility that Iran develops nuclear weapons and “allows” a handful of them to fall into al-Qaeda’s hands. When terrorist cells detonate them, or (we hope!) get caught with them beforehand, Iran will deny everything, insisting that the bombs must have come from North Korea, Pakistan, or some other source. Leftists in the West will believe them, or say they do, and oppose retaliation. The best strategy in such a case might be an attack on Iran to devastate its nuclear capability—which, I take it, is what those military strategists have in mind—ideally before WMDs fall into terrorists’ hands. But that would fall far short of Wretchard’s total extermination scenario.